Plan – Catching Up, Making Progress

The plan of attack for myself will be to pick up where I left off with various different tasks that will require me to figure things out in Unity which is including updating the master scene and getting all of the assets into Unity and setup. The animatic can be used for the process of timing the interview sequence and the animations that need to be triggered throughout the sequence.

Naming Conventions –

We have had a discussion about naming conventions and now understand that we will have a default naming convention for different kinds of assets for example animations will be known as _ANIM, Textures will be known as _TXT and materials will be known as _MAT. This makes things so much easier in unity as things are able to be sorted into the correct folder structure easily and we can tell at first glance exactly what we are looking at in the project.

Timing The Interview Sequence –

I have been working on timing the interview sequence and having difficulty getting the actions using the custom: enable/disable action in the actionlist to remember the fields of what they are enabling and disabling so this launched me into trying to figure out constant ID’s and how the object much have a constant ID component and that this constant ID should match that of the ID displayed on the action within the actionlist.

This is the way that this has been setup and it should work however whenever I quit the project and come into it the actionlist does not remember the fields still. This is an obstacle that I will need to try and figure out when I have more time but for now this is not an issue as I can plug the objects in and not close it until I get a build which means we can still obtain a functional experience.

The fade out of the interview has also been causing havoc as it took a lot of time to figure out that whatever time it took to fade out this would need to be taken out of the time of the action that is telling the experience to pause while the duration of the interview takes place and subtracting the fade time means that the sequence will begin to fade out before he is finished speaking which is far nicer than an abrupt cut.

I had tried various different tests with using other actionlists and the action actionlist: run in parallel to try and run an actionlist at the same time that would fade out but you still had to tell the actionlist to wait until the interview sequence duration was almost up and then fade out and this was possible within the same actionlist so having a parallel actionlist was actually unnecessary.

The interview sequences are also bugging out in the way that sometimes they play and sometimes they do not even if everything is in working order in the actionlist and the action to enable the sequence is on with the correct sequence in the field of the action sometimes it still will not play and I have no idea why this is happening but I do remember this was also an issue on a previous project.

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Timing The Animation Assets –

As I have all of the assets that are up to date for now from the ladies I have been able to import them to Unity and set them up. Each asset that has an animation on it requires this to be set up within a state machine that I need to create so that I can later trigger these animations in the actionlist. All of the assets require a material that I must create in Unity so that I can plug in the textures that are relevant to each gameobject.

The assets that I have been able to include are as follows –

Celebrity Heads

Seamus Heaney Sequence

Painterly elements

Landscape Sequence

Framed Paintings

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I have also been working on a spotlight that will fade in and fade out based on an animation that I created. This spotlight is to highlight colin when he is apparent in the experience and to try and show that he is the focus of the interview at this point.

Testing Inside The Oculus –

As I have been working on figuring out these things in Unity we got together to see what it looks like not only on the screen but within the Oculus. We are glad to finallly see things starting to come together even though a lot of work needs to be carried out on timing we are still happier with the knowledge that the assets are functioning.

Sound –

This is also the first experience we have had playing the interview sequence with sound and viewing it inside the Oculus the experience is incredible and it feels so strange not being able to see or hear anything in the real world while using this your are totally consumed by the experience. Stating the obvious of creating virtual reality its so hard to know exactly what this feels like until you try it. Fiona has been looking more into sound work and collaborating with her house mate Chris (the sound guy) to try and figure out what we need and our best approach.

Dividing The Actionlists (Better Organisation) –

The logic for the interview sequence is currently being carried out on the one actionlist and things are starting to become a bit difficult to follow not to mention every time I am trying to time the sequences and animations I am having to play the entire interview experience from the beginning to the end repeating this process with every change I make.

I have been splitting the actionlist into sections by using comments based on the sequence of events that is taking place at the time. I have also added a structure to the scene hierarchy so that we know what is happening next. This will make it easier for me to split it into various actionlists so that I can follow things better and also so that I can call the different sections based on the one that I want to time at that moment.

Reflection –

I think that we are making good progress and we are setting a steady pace. Things are starting to gel together in Unity so now we can get feedback from different participants and keep making changes to improve the experience.

For a while there we had many assets made but as they were not in Unity together it seemed like we were far from the finish line but now that everything is together in a project and logic is working it seems like we are getting closer to the experience we want to have. We are still far from having a polished outcome but our aim was to learn from our mistakes and finish the project first and then move on to polishing.

End Of Year Show Talk –

On a side note yesterday we attended the talk about the End Of Year Show to find out about the show and the health and safety surrounding the show. Our task for this is to fill in a student exhibition contract and get it signed by Conann and return it to Catherine Brown by the 22nd April. So We filled them in today and were hoping to get them signed and returned as soon as possible.

The End of year show will run from the 4th – 11th June 2016 and will have an annual awards ceremony on the opening night if the 3rd June. All of the end of year show is ticket free apart from Thursday 2nd June which will be a private event night. We should also have all of our work removed from the University by 15th June 2016.